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Books So Bad They're Good: The Ultimate Rabbit Hole [1]

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Date: 2022-12-10

Such is the sad fate of the man who wrote the book that so fascinated me all those years ago. An otherwise unremarkable “house journalist” for a major corporation, he became so obsessed with a crime that it wrecked his marriage, destroyed his career, and ruined his health. He’s been called the last victim of the criminal he spent his life researching, and it’s hard to argue otherwise.

His name was Maury Terry. His book was called The Ultimate Evil, and he spent the last three decades of his life trying to prove that its thesis — that there was a massive, nationwide conspiracy of Satanists behind some of America’s most atrocious crimes — was true:

The Ultimate Evil, by Maury Terry — Maury Terry seemed to have it all by the mid-1970s. Raised in a comfortable middle class home, he’d gone to college, worked briefly as a reporter covering the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., then settled down as an in-house writer/editor at IBM. Married, with plenty of friends and enough money to vacation on Fire Island, he could have been any suburban mid-level corporate employee living the post-war good life.

Then came the summer of 1977.

Satan, headed to visit his bestest buddy David down in...Yonkers?????

That was when a series of shootings in the outer boroughs of New York City suddenly exploded onto the national scene. A lone gunman had been gunning down young people in Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn for the last several months, either single females with long hair or couples parked in lovers’ lanes, and the police seemed helpless to stop him. Spurred on New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin, who published several letters purportedly from the killer in a series of overheated columns, what had been a local crime spree became front page news across the country and even overseas. New York, which had been rocked by skyrocketing crime rates, financial mismanagement, and scandals that had all but ripped the police department to spreads, was suddenly a cautionary tale for the entire country of the dangers of modern city life.

The eventual capture of the shooter, a postal worker named David Berkowitz, should have ended the frenzy. He’d only been caught thanks to a parking ticket near the last killing, true, but he was off the streets and quickly confessed. The confession was, to put it mildly, strange — Berkowitz claimed to have killed at the explicit instruction of his neighbor’s Labrador retriever, who was allegedly possessed by demons — but Berkowitz stuck to it, and both police and courts accepted it, demon dog and all. Evidence found in Berkowitz’s apartment supposedly clinched the deal, and he looked enough like some of the witness sketches to pass muster. The killings ended, and that should have been it.

The only problem was that Berkowitz may not have been guilty.

This, at least, was the contention of Maury Terry. He had followed the case like every other New Yorker, and was puzzled by how little Berkowitz resembled the description of several witnesses to the attacks. He began digging, teamed up with freelancer Jim Mitteager, and soon came to the conclusion that Berkowitz had had at least one accomplice. There were a few red herrings along the way — there’s a long and amusing section about Satanists on Staten Island that turns out to be thanks to “Catholic visionary” Veronica Leuken sending nastygrams accusing random strangers of being the Son of Sam — but those were quickly debunked. Further research led him to the realization that he not only had debunked the “Berkowitz is a lone nut” theory of the crime, but had discovered that Berkowitz and two neighbors, John and Michael Carr, had been part of a murderous Satanic cult that met in a local park to graffiti abandoned buildings, sacrifice German shepherds, and plot murder after murder.

And not just murders in New York, oh no no no. Terry eventually concluded that the Son of Sam killings were part of a nationwide murder spree perpetrated by a splinter group of the 1960s neo-Gnostic cult called The Process Church of the Final Judgment. The Process, which had tenuous links to Charles Manson, had openly worshipped Satan alongside Jehovah, Christ, and Lucifer, and rumors of animal sacrifice, murder, and sexual deviance had followed it for years. Terry connected Berkowitz to this offshoot, the Children, and through them to multiple suspicious killings across the country. One of these, the brutal rape and murder of a devout young evangelical named Arlis Perry, had actually taken place in the campus chapel at Stanford University, while others (the disappearance and murder of impresario Roy Radin, the suicide of John Carr) took place after David Berkowitz was safely in jail. Terry was convinced that at least some of these later killings were at the hands of the Children’s chief assassin, whom he nicknamed “Manson II,” and that the Children were part of a huge, underground Satanic conspiracy that had been slaughtering the innocent pretty much with impunity since the late 1960s.

Of course the police didn’t listen — they’d already caught Son of Sam, after all, so no need to listen to any who challenged their precious theories — and neither did the national press. Even the notorious New York tabloids refused to publish Terry’s theories. He was forced to turn to small suburban papers to get his theories into print, where they sank like a stone. His marriage collapsed, and so did his career at IBM.

Then, a full decade after the last Son of Sam murder, Terry finally found vindication: The Ultimate Evil was published, and it rocketed straight to the top of the bestseller lists. Terry himself was booked on all the major talk shows, interviewed by major publications, and sharing the fruits of his expertise with anyone who’d listen. He even made guest appearances on network shows like Unsolved Mysteries and Biography, where he expounded at length on the danger the Children and similar Satanic cults posed to the American public.

Best of all? He finally got to interview David Berkowitz himself in the early 1990s, and Berkowitz, who’d converted to Christianity in jail, admitted that yes, there was a cult, yes, he’d belonged to it, and yes, he had had accomplices when he went on his murderous rampage.

All of which should have sealed Maury Terry’s reputation as a master reporter. Assignments from major publications should have followed, with further books, articles, and best sellers. True crime was hot in the 1980s and 1990s, and Maury Terry seemed on the verge of a truly stunning career.

Except that he didn’t.

Oh, there was a second interview with David Berkowitz, who now was involved in a prison ministry and showed no signs of demonic possession, mental illness, or anything but a bland normality. But outside of those TV appearances, and the occasional article, there was nothing. He didn’t write a sequel to The Ultimate Evil, he didn’t write about any other murders, and after a few years he didn’t even make any television appearances. He did publish an updated edition of his masterpiece, with a new forward, but that was about it.

It wasn’t that America had lost its taste for sensational crime — just look at the success of Ann Rule, who’d parlayed her work on Ted Bundy into a string of bestsellers, or veteran journalists like Jack Olson and Carleton Stowers, or any of a dozen others who’d capitalized on the national obsession with serial killers, mysterious disappearances, and disturbingly attractive murders. A second book on the Son of Sam murders, or any of the deaths Terry believed were linked to the Children, would have fit right in. So what happened?

Perhaps it was the sudden collapse of the “Satanic panic” that had dominated American pop culture since the early 1980s, when the country was flooded with bogus “memoirs” about Satanic cults abusing small children, followed by a wave of literal witch hunts accusing innocent daycare workers of raping, beating, and otherwise torturing their charges for the greater glory of Our Lord Beelzebub. The Ultimate Evil was part of this trend, despite Maury Terry insisting that no, it was a crime investigation that just happened to involve a Satanic cult, and it should not have surprised anyone when interest faded as it became clear that no, thousands of babies had not vanished during evil demonic rituals.

Or maybe it was simply that, for all of its propulsive prose and compelling story, The Ultimate Evil was neither as good nor as groundbreaking as it initially appeared to be.

This isn’t to say that Terry was necessarily wrong. David Berkowitz himself has said more than once he did not act alone, and maintained as recently as 2020 that yes, he was part of a cult. How much of that is him telling the truth and how much is thanks to his conversion to evangelical Christianity is not clear, but Maury Terry may well have gotten this part of the story right.

At the same time, though...extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof, and for all its seeming authenticity and reliance on original research, this is where The Ultimate Evil fails to convince:

There’s no hint of a bibliography, or footnotes, or so much as a paragraph explaining that Terry had to protect his sources so would be changing the names of his interviewees. There’s a brief afterword thanking about two dozen people, but that isn’t enough to verify his work product, let alone prove his assertions.

The major Satanic cult in the United States was not The Process (which also worshipped Jehovah, Lucifer, and Christ). It was the Church of Satan, which was (and still is) an atheistic, existentialist movement started by American Anton LaVey at least partly as a satire of organized religion and the actual witch hunts of the early modern era. Most of their “rituals” were staged for the press, which had no idea LaVey was pranking them until years later.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/10/2137432/-Books-So-Bad-They-re-Good-The-Ultimate-Rabbit-Hole

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